Patch 5.4 - Ghostcrawler Interview
Ghostcrawler was in Asia last week and QQ was able to sit down with him for an interview. Keep in mind that things are often lost in translation or mistranslated! Thanks to ngacnlcq for the translation.

The Hearthstone board that was added in a PTR build is just for decoration and there is no plan to add Hearthstone to WoW.

The Lesser Charms that may be added to the Asian store are there as a convenience item for players that may not have time to do their daily quests that week or players who just want to save time. There are no plans to add items to the store that will increase player stats.

Patch 5.4 is the last content (raid?) patch, but there will be bugfix and balance patches after it, as well as a pre-expansion patch.

Patch 5.4 - Timeless Isle Armor
The Timeless Isle will allow players to obtain item level 496 and 535 gear through drops found around the island.

The items used to create the 496 armor are found all over the island in chests and dropped by mobs, similar to the items used to create armor in Battlefield: Barrens. The Burden of Eternity is a rare drop from mobs, found in the Blazing Chest, or in one of Kukuru's chests.

Patch 5.4 normal difficulty gear has an item level of 553, while flex gear is 540, and raid finder gear is 528. This makes the 535 Timeless gear a nice upgrade for players that will only raid in Raid Finder difficulty and a temporary upgrade for players who will be raiding Flex difficulty. It is also an upgrade for players who are currently raiding Throne of Thunder Normal, as well as any Heroic raiders still missing a slot.

Drain Soul no longer energizes Soul Shards from the pets and guardians of players, and now deals 40% less damage. If other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).

Haunt now deals 50% more damage, and increases damage done by all of the Warlock's damage-over-time other spells against the target by 45%.

For Affliction Warlocks, Grimoire of Sacrifice now increases the power of various single target spells by 20% (down from 30%).

Class Armor

Warlock Tier-14 4-piece set bonus now reduces the cooldown of Unending Resolve by 20 seconds. increases all damage dealt by the Warlock by 10% while Dark Soul is active.

Items

Indomitable Primal Diamond's chance for the meta-gem effect to activate is no longer affected by the wearer’s haste. Additionally, the chance to activate the effect has been increased by 50%.

[PTR]: For testing purposes, Glyphataur, Ph.D (He's a doctor!) will be available near the Alliance/Horde shrines in Vale of Eternal Blossoms selling new glyphs.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Past Legendary Items for Patch 5.4
The legendary meta gem will still function, but Sha-touched gems and sockets will not be applicable to new 5.4 items.

No extra sockets in 5.4? Then why the hell did you update the 5.2 weapons from ToT to be able to use them? This is incredibly stupid and seems like a total oversight. 1750g for a new weapon socket is SO not that expensive.
We updated the 5.2 weapons to allow the additional socket (but not the Sha-touched gems) because a very large number of players were getting their extra sockets just in time for the patch to drop (and thus, would only be able to use their reward for a week or two). That's not the case with 5.4. The 5.2 legendary meta gem will continue to function, and the 5.3 epic cloak will upgrade into the 5.4 legendary.

We feel that, at this point, the Sha-Touched gem and socket have had plenty of time to be useful and it's time for them to go. As Lothrik mentioned, we'll be balancing content assuming that they're not present anyway. That said, nothing on the PTR is final, and we are still open to discussion on the topic. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Proving Grounds Feedback
Just a quick note that we're still doing a lot of tuning for Proving Grounds, and your feedback has been (and continues to be) invaluable. There will be a bunch more bug fixes and tweaks in the next build for testing.

In particular, the next build has a lot of work done on the AI for the friendly party members in the Healer trials. Once it hits the PTR, we'd really appreciate any feedback on how they're acting, especially specific examples of things they do that seem "dumb." I don't have an exact timeframe on when that build will go up, but it should be within the next few days (UPDATE: should be today!) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)RPPMScaling with Rune Regeneration Mechanics
After some investigation, we found that rune regeneration mechanics were, indeed, giving an unintended increase to RPPM proc rates. Unholy in particular gains a significant performance boost from this bug. We're going to fix the bug, but we'll also be compensating Unholy.

In the next build, Unholy Presence will give pure haste, rather than just attack speed. This will allow it to (legitimately) increase proc rates for RPPM mechanics. Runic Corruption and Improved Blood Presence, however, will no longer have an effect on RPPM proc rates. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

reused nonset parts from MSV and i was hoping for another poke at the oldschool armor like 5.3. More retarded speculation from twitter -.- Were all gonna have to live with pre unannounced expansion complaintthreads even more then... will know soon what there is to complain about

The Lesser Charms that may be added to the Asian store are there as a convenience item for players that may not have time to do their daily quests that week or players who just want to save time. There are no plans to add items to the store that will increase player stats.

And for players who are sick of doing them which is mostly everyone!

Shamelessly trying to get players to buy themselves out of horrible content.

Bandaid fix for Arcane's movement restriction. Just rework Rune of Power to not be placed on the ground and make it a 1 minute buff, or buff the other two or at least one of them to be a good alternative for Arcane. 8 yds is nothing, if you have to move from something, you usually have to move 10-15 yds to play it safe (Meg bombs, overlapping Feed Young puddles, DURUMU'S MAZE (bye bye dps when constantly moving.) etc, etc. That is one of the changes that I came across when trying to help a friend learn Arcane that honestly pissed me off. Worst Design Ever.

'The Lesser Charms that may be added to the Asian store are there as a convenience item for players that may not have time to do their daily quests that week or players who just want to save time. There are no plans to add items to the store that will increase player stats.'

Maybe if the western market mass quits, maybe we will get some love too! Like buying premade lvl 90's for those who want to 'save time' lvling up and maybe we can buy a set of full pvp bop gear for those of us who want to 'save time' from farming honour. Hell maybe we can buy the full list of achiv's and HC gear to 'save time' from even playing this game!

Seriously a massive joke how much more blizzard is a money hungry grabbing company as opposed to back in the old days.

Don't do the squish guys, the amount of changes to old content and to numbers for new content amount the vast ocean of content is what is driving people away, aka the turbulent storm of change vs the calm sea of tranquility.

Why not just give asians fully geared chars with no raid lockout? First they make shared lockouts and kill pug raiding, then they make raiding have a bazzillion difficulties. Just go back to the old model.

I also hope a complete overhaul of frost DK is incoming because currently they suck ass and the lack of changes is deeply disturbing.

If they waste there fucking time scaling every single mob down in wow I have lost all faith in there time organisation. They are just numbers. There are better things to spend time on.

I don't think they will take their time to scale every single mob down rather than do it a quicker way, but amen sister/brother. I don't get why Blizzard wants to waste time on making numbers look smaller and I don't get why so many people jumped the bandwagon years ago and how they think the item squish is soooo, soooo important even though it has zero importance whatsoever.

Originally Posted by leaks

Well it's good to see the keyboard activists in full effect. Doing the laziest, most asinine thing they could think of off the top of their heads and calling it justice while making no difference.

Originally Posted by C9H20

Blizzard effectively wants to have its cake and eat it too by pretending to have this groundbreaking war in a faction capital while at the same time being completely unwilling to portray logical consequences of such an event.